Last Resort

by Alison Lurie

  “Seriously,” he added. “When you get to be my age, you start thinking about your family. Like that Gauguin painting. Where do we come from, Who are we, Where are we going? I even have occasional embarrassing impulses to show people photographs of my grandchildren.”

  “Oh yeah? Do you have them with you?” Lee asked.

  “I must admit I do. All three.”

  “Okay. Hand them over.”

  For the next ten minutes Lennie and Lee exchanged photographs and family news. It was in a more relaxed manner that, as he put the snapshots away, she remarked “You know, I’m surprised you should come to a conference on The Writer and Nature. I thought you didn’t care for nature.”

  “You’re right, I’ve never been a great fan. Seems to me it’s what civilization was invented to get away from. But there’s not too much of the stuff around here.”

  “Come on.” Lee nodded at her trumpet vine, still thick with red and gold blossoms, and the leafy street beyond. “What do you call that?”

  “Aw, that’s just pretty scenery. I have nothing against scenery, as long as it stays in its place.” Lennie raised his glass to the trumpet vine, and drank.

  “And what really surprises me is that they invited you.”

  “That’s easy. I’m here as the bad guy.” He set down the glass, pulled his still thick, coarse gray-black hair into two horns, and gave his cousin a devilish grin. “They need someone like me to rile them, make them rush to the defense of their favorite useless plant or animal, get the energy level up. Otherwise it’s all too nicey-nice. That’s why they’ve called my panel ‘Nature and Anti-Nature.’ I’m Anti-Nature. When I go on tomorrow, it’ll liven things up, you’ll see.”

  “So what will you say?”

  Lennie shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet. Maybe I’ll start in on one of their heroes, say for instance Thoreau. You know he was a mama’s boy, like so many naturalists? Used to send his laundry home from Walden like some kid at summer camp.”

  “Really?”

  “God’s truth. Or should I say, Goddess’s truth?” Lee did not reply. “You still into all that?”

  The answer was, Yes, in some ways, but Lee did not supply it. “But it’ll be three to one,” she said instead.

  “So what?” He shrugged. “It’ll be easy going up against those famous softheads. Kind of fun, really. There won’t be any surprises; I know most of them already.” Lennie smiled. Altogether, there were fifteen speakers at the conference, and it was safe to say that in the past he had insulted or annoyed every one of them in some way, either in person or in print—though in many cases Lennie (unlike his victims) had forgotten this.

  “Really.”

  “Listen, I’ve known Gerry Grass since we were both at an arts colony thirty years ago. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s still stuck back there in the sixties, trying to get in touch with Nature. Wandering about the world looking for her like Bo-Peep’s poor lost sheep.”

  “I thought he was a famous American poet.”

  “Sure, why not? You don’t have to be intellectually brilliant to be a famous American poet. It’s a handicap, sometimes. Innocent egotism, good looks, romantic sensibility, a thrilling speaking voice, and a nice little lyric gift, that’s what makes it with the reviewers and the public. You met him yet?”

  “Just yesterday, at the opening reception.”

  “I hear he’s split with his girlfriend, what’s her name, Huff or Tiff or Spat, something like that. Poor dope. He should have been warned the moment they were introduced; he’s supposed to be sensitive to language.”

  Lee laughed. “So who else is on the panel with you?”

  “Well, there’s Wilkie Walker, the Friend of the Salt Marsh Mouse, and all our other little furry friends.” (Lee opened her mouth to make some equally negative comment, then closed it.) “And Dolly Acker, of course, author of Whale Music, the most famous nature writer of her generation, according to the brochure.”

  “It sounds as if you don’t care for her,” Lee said.

  “Not all that much, no. I don’t like beautiful women who prefer fish to me. If I get lucky, I can make her cry. I’m looking forward to that.”

  Lee laughed again. “If you make Dolly Acker cry, that audience will lynch you.”

  “You think so?” Lennie raised his heavy eyebrows. “But you’ll protect me, won’t you, Lelia? You’ll charge onto the stage and fight the assailants off with your umbrella, like you used to when you and Cousin Roger were playing Robin Hood and the Dragons, or whatever it was.”

  Below the porch a car pulled into Lee’s driveway. Jenny Walker got out, slammed the door ineffectively, and ran up the steps. Her long pale hair was loose over a gray cotton dress printed with paler gray bamboo leaves, and she looked flushed, anxious, and very pretty.

  “Oh, Lee!” she cried in a tremulous rush. “I’m so glad you’re here. I just can’t make it tonight, Wilkie’s changed his mind, he says we have to go to the art opening, and the dinner tomorrow too. I can’t possibly see you until Sunday. I know that’s awful. But I’ve got good news too: we’re going to stay through April, and we’re probably coming back in October. So you’ll forgive me, won’t you?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lee said awkwardly. “Jenny, this is my cousin Lennie Zimmern, that I’ve told you about. Jenny Walker.”

  “What?” Jenny gasped. “Oh, hello, I didn’t see you.” She took a breath and shifted with evident strain into a social manner. “I mean of course I knew you were coming, I saw your name in the program. But you weren’t at the lunch today at the Rusty Anchor.”

  “No,” Lennie agreed. “I make a point of never eating at restaurants with cute names.”

  “And are you enjoying Key West?”

  “I can’t say yet.”

  “Oh, you’ll like it, I’m sure. Everyone does. Well, I must dash.” With a brief helpless glance at Lee, she ran down the steps.

  “Well,” Lennie said, as Jenny’s car pulled out of the driveway. “What was all that about? No, on second thought, don’t tell me, let me guess. You’re in love.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Lee said rather tensely. “Jenny’s just a little frantic and overextended now, because of the conference. She gets like that sometimes.”

  “Come on, Lelia. I’ve seen Jenny Walker for years at Academy dinners, and I’ve never seen her like that. She’s always been the perfect lady. Calm and cool and collected.”

  “That doesn’t prove—” Lee, who detested lies, lied with difficulty. “It’s not what you think.”

  Lennie looked at her, frowning a little, then smiled. “Come on, Lelia,” he repeated. “You ought to realize by now that I won’t tell on you. Shit, it’s been nearly fifty years, and I’m still the only person that knows who broke the bathroom window in your aunt’s house in Queens.

  “I should congratulate you,” he added, when Lee said nothing. “She’s a very attractive woman. Beautiful, even. Maybe a little flavorless for my taste.”

  “Jenny is not flavorless,” Lee heard herself protest against her better judgment, in a voice that, she realized too late, gave everything away.

  “No? Well, you know best.” Lennie allowed himself an aggravating smile. “I’ve never tasted her myself.”

  “She’s too good, that’s all,” Lee said, ignoring this smile and trying to speak casually. “The trouble is, she wants to make everyone happy, including her husband, who’s a complete egotist and MCP.”

  “Really.”

  “He thinks he loves her, but he has no consideration for her. Treats her as if she were his secretary, even though he couldn’t write his books without her. But she won’t leave him.”

  “No, I can understand that. After all, who would she be if she weren’t Mrs. Wilkie Walker?”

  Lee sighed, but managed to say nothing, though she couldn’t help remembering what Jenny had whispered to her only yesterday: Yes, of course I love you. But Wilkie’s work is my life. Anyhow, it’s what I can do for the world, you k
now?

  “She seems to be a popular item,” Lennie remarked. “I have the impression that Gerry Grass has a crush on her too. When he was reading this rather obvious poem about lost white birds and lost white-skinned women at the symposium this morning he kept gawking at her.”

  “He hasn’t got a chance,” Lee said.

  “Glad to hear it.” Lennie smiled. “But you know, Wilkie Walker might not be around forever. Gerry told me last night that he was in the hospital here a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Yeah. But it wasn’t anything. He had some sort of intestinal attack. Nerves I think it was.”

  “Could be. I have to say that he still puts up a good show in public, though. Father Nature, all wise and kind. You should go and hear him sometime this weekend, see what you’re up against.”

  “No thanks,” Lee said. Last night, at the opening reception of the conference, she had met Wilkie Walker for the first, and she hoped the last, time. As she’d expected, he had been both polite and patronizing, recognizing her as Jenny’s friend, but showing no wish to know her better himself.

  What had surprised Lee was Wilkie’s appearance.

  Nothing that Jenny had said, and none of the magazine or book-jacket photographs, had prepared her for his being so heavy, gray, worn, and slow-moving. Why, he’s an old man, she had thought, and an inconvenient flood of compassion had sloshed over her. No wonder he’d believed he was ill, dying even.

  Lennie’s right, she thought now. Wilkie won’t be around forever. But whether or not he was around, Jenny would be determined to get his book into publishable shape. There was no point in trying to fight that, because in Jenny’s mind it was her book too. When he and the manuscript went north she would go with them. And though she and Lee might manage to meet somehow, somewhere, this summer, she would be gone for the next half-year.

  But that wasn’t going to happen just yet. Lee remembered something she had read once, that as you grow older and the future shrinks, you have only two choices: you can live in the fading past, or, like children do, in the bright full present.

  Jenny would be here for nearly two more months—the rest of March and all April. Spring was Lee’s favorite season in Key West: by early April most of the tourists would be gone, as well as the college students who had made the town noisy and dangerous with their rented mopeds and riotous intoxication.

  The weather would be perfect: the nights warm and romantic. Almost every day, as soon as the conference was over, Jenny would come to the guest house, and sometimes late at night too, after Wilkie was asleep—as she had already done several times.

  They would be together often as the island became steadily quieter, more beautiful, and more overgrown with flowers. Together they would watch the purple and white orchid trees unfold into bloom; they would see the stubby spread hands of the frangipani put out their pink and white and golden velvet whorls of petals, and the poinciana explode slowly overhead in drifts of scarlet confetti.

  A Biography of Alison Lurie

  Alison Lurie (b. 1926) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction and nonfiction. Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, she grew up in a family of storytellers. Her father was a sociology professor and later the head of a social work agency; her mother was a former journalist. Lurie graduated from Radcliffe College, and in 1969 joined the English department at Cornell University, where she taught courses on children’s literature, among others.

  Lurie’s first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), is a story of romance and deception among the faculty of a snowbound New England college. It won favorable reviews and established her as a keen observer of love in academia. Her next novel, The Nowhere City (1965), records the confused adventures of a young New England couple in Los Angeles among Hollywood starlets and Venice Beach hippies. She followed this with Imaginary Friends (1967), which focuses on a group of small-town spiritualists who believe they are in touch with extraterrestrial beings.

  Her next novel, Real People (1969), led the New York Times to call her “one of our most talented and intelligent novelists.” The tale unfolds in a famous artists’ colony where much more than writing and painting occurs. Lurie then returned to an academic setting with her bestseller The War Between the Tates (1974), and drew on her own childhood in Only Children (1979). Four years later she published Foreign Affairs, her best-known novel, which traces the erotic entanglements of two American professors in England. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

  The Truth About Lorin Jones (1988) follows a biographer around the United States as she searches for the real, and sometimes shocking, story of a famous woman painter—a character who appears as an eight-year-old in Only Children. The Last Resort (1999) takes place in Key West, Florida, among a group of ill-assorted characters, some of who appear in earlier Lurie novels. Truth and Consequences (2005) returns to an academic setting and plumbs the troubles of a professor with back trouble, his exhausted wife, and two poets—one famous and one not.

  Lurie has also published a collection of semi-supernatural stories, Women and Ghosts (1994), and a memoir of the poet James Merrill, Familiar Spirits (2001). Her interest in children’s literature inspired three collections of folktales, including Clever Gretchen (1980), which features little-known stories with strong female heroines. She has published two nonfiction books on children’s literature, as well: Don’t Tell the Grown-ups (1990) and Boys and Girls Forever (2003). In the lavishly illustrated The Language of Clothes (1981), she offers a lighthearted study of the semiotics of dress.

  Lurie officially retired from Cornell in 1998, but continues to teach and write. In 2012 she was named to a two-year term as the official New York State Author. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and is married to the writer Edward Hower. She has three grown sons and three grandchildren.

  Lurie at age seven.

  Lurie at age fourteen, wearing her first long party dress in preparation for dancing school.

  Lurie and her dog, Sliver, in the backyard of her family’s home in White Plains, New York, in the summer of 1947. (Photo courtesy of Kroch Library.)

  Lurie on the porch of her parents’ home in White Plains, New York, in the early spring of 1947.

  Lurie with her husband, Edward Hower, in Key West, Florida, in 2008.

  Lurie and Hower.

  Lurie in 2009.

  Lurie’s three sons, from left to right, John, Jeremy, and Joshua, in October 2011.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1998 by Alison Lurie

  cover design by Elushika Werrakoon

  978-1-4532-7123-0

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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